Thursday, March 19, 2009

Top 10 worst Irish accents on film

Julia Roberts and Sean Connery may have won Academy Awards, but that does not mean that they can pull off a believable Irish accent on screen. See who else made the list of worst movie attempts at an Irish accent, including two more Oscar winners.

By

Conn Corrigan

,

IrishCentral.com Staff Writer

Julia Roberts as Mary Reilly

The Irish accent, judging from some of Hollywood's attempts at it over the years, must surely be one of the most difficult for actors to master. (Unless of course, the actor in question is already Irish. In which case it becomes considerably easier.)

Presumably then, it's also one of the easiest to mess up, as this top 10 list of bad Irish accents shows.

It might also be pointed out that it's not just the Irish accent that the Bond star has grappled with it - no doubt he also made the cut for some Top 10 List of Bad Russian Accents for his portrayal of Captain Marko Ramius, a Russian commander submarine commander in the movie, "The Hunt for Red October."

Every so often, U.S. actors - even really good, respected actors like Kevin Spacey - come out with stuff like "Ordinary Decent Criminal," a fairly unremarkable movie save for the fact that the main stars all try to outdo one another on the bad Irish accent front.

It's a kind of bizarre concoction of various Irish regional accents - a little bit of Dublin, a touch of Northern Ireland - that slips into American every fifth sentence or so.

It's astonishing that Colin Farrell, a native Dubliner, didn't think of saying to Spacey, "What the f**k, Kevin?! No one in Ireland, and I mean no one, talks like that! Now go get a voice coach and give the Oirish accent a rest!"

This mustn't have happened - and indeed, the director, Thaddeus O'Sullivan, himself an Irishman, somehow failed to spot that Spacey's co-star, Linda Fiorentino, had an equally ridiculous accent. Shame on both O'Sullivan and Farrell for not spotting these...

It remains a mystery why this film actually got made, when John Boorman's "The General" - a movie about the same thing - came out before it, and is vastly superior.

One of the other stock Irish characters in Hollywood movies is the Irish terrorist. (For example, Sean Bean in "Patriot Games," Brad Pitt in "The Devils Own," Richard Gere in "The Jackal," etc.)

Perhaps the worst bad Irish accent offender from the Irish terrorist category is Tommy Lee Jones' portrayal of Ryan Gaerity in "Blown Away," above and beyond the worst Northern Irish accent you are every likely to hear. Real-life Northern Irish terrorists must have been disgusted that their movement could be insulted with such a woeful accent.

To be perfectly fair to the much pilloried Tom Cruise, his Irish accent in "Far and Away" is truly appalling.

Joseph Donnelly, the 19th century Irish peasant played by Cruise, sounds like how a Hollywood film executive imagines Irish people talk.

If Cruise's Irish accent has any redeeming features it's that it might fall into the "It's so bad, it's funny" category of Irish on screen accents.

It also diverts attention from Nicole Kidman's efforts at an Irish accent in the same movie. (In one scene, Cruise tells Kidman, "Yer a corker, Shannon. What a corker you are!" - a well known Irish pick-up line.) While being fairly feeble, it's not the crime against Irish humanity perpetrated by her ex-husband, to be sure, to be sure.

While not sinking to the same depths as Richard Gere in "The Jackal," Brad Pitt still manages to embarrass himself - and indeed anyone from Northern Ireland - with his efforts at playing Frankie Gallagher, an IRA man on-the-run.

Apparently, Pitt spent a few days hanging around Belfast to perfect a Belfast accent. (He was even attacked in West Belfast while he was researching the role.)